Chapter Text
Let us get home before the night grows dark:
For clouds may gather
Though this is summer weather,
Put out the lights and drench us through;
Then if we lost our way what should we do?
Goblin Market
Christina Rossetti
Life telescoped ten thousand fragile bones from soil to void, using stars as stairwells, and when she had tied the clouds of every sky together, she began to make her own stars and steer her own path. Ten thousand years removed from the grasping hands that built her sky, Jaina’s fragile bones still know that dirt is not a proper place to keep one’s feet, and so she guides them one by one up towards man-made suns that masquerade as buoys. Her stairs will always be well-lit; even when she stares into the spaces between the beacons, she will see nothing but an afterimage of the woman all her heroes are raising her to be. She will not see the black beneath the stairs, and if she does, she will turn away.
But when Life began to build upon herself, she had to leave some souls behind; souls to crouch and crawl in teeming earth, souls for other souls to stand upon until ten thousand shoulders rose beyond an atmosphere. Some say Life only makes so many stars so that she cannot see those she tasks to do a groundworm’s work. Ten thousand shoulders removed from Jaina, Zekk sees only the shadows, only an unlit corridor where he will become rags and rusted durocrete, the broken, dirty thing a city of lights is grinding him to be.
And that is where he hears things that Jaina does not –
(hears because there is nothing by which to see) –
Beautiful, beautiful promises whispered thick and sonorous, tangled languorous and lustful underneath the city streets; promises of strength drawn from dust and hatred, from a short lifetime of never-enoughs and nowheres. They echo down canyons carved as corridors for progress, abandoned to the darkness when another stair was built. Zekk feels them in his hands, curls his fingers around the meaningless words, lets himself drown in currents of energy that burn his skin but never light his way. These whispers offer a satiety he cannot turn away from, one that nullifies his aching, swallows all his desperate grieving.
Jaina would never so much as listen.
And if she did, she would not understand the whispers, not like Zekk does; she would never set her boots against bloodstains and follow them until she held the murder weapon between her own slim fingers. No, she might follow him, might watch the blood drip from his knife with horror in her eyes, but she would bring a light behind her, and she would try to stop the bleeding.
Builder and backbone, backbone and builder; set against one another, they only come to realize that she is a product of his labor and he the fruit of her engineering. Life tries to justify the whispers and the undercurrents in his tired spirit as necessary evils, but Jaina places her hands over Zekk’s ears and kisses his eyelids until they open to the lights she has been climbing to. She leads him stair by stair, ten thousand years of yesterdays falling from their shoulders as they ascend, telescoping one another to a far-off sky.
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